Ryano Stuff

Irish Citizens for Trustworthy eVoting (ICTE) have finally had a meeting with the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and officials from his department. Representing ICTE at the meeting yesterday were Colm MacCárthaigh, Margaret McGaley and Adrian Colley. You can find a preliminary report on the meeting on the archives of the e-voting mailing list.

At first glance, it doesn’t appear as if much progress was made, although getting a meeting in itself was something of a breakthrough:

The Minister expressed surprise that this was our first meeting with the Department. He said that this was a “very open Department” and added that you couldn’t find a group of people who cared more - or knew more -
about voting systems than the Franchise section. I pointed out that we had been trying to communicate with the Department on this matter since 2001, but without success, and that as a result we had been involved in a dialogue of the deaf for much of the intervening time.

As we only have this preliminary and informal report so far, I won’t comment further at this stage.

The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) have been briefing newspapers on the “legal minefields” new owners of iPods and other digital music players may face. From an article in this week’s Sunday Business Post:

Dick Doyle, the managing director of Irma, told The Sunday Business Post that it was “against the law’‘ to copy music onto iPods and other devices. “People should know that private copying from one medium to another is illegal,” he said.

“There is no private copying exemption in Irish law. You cannot burn downloaded music onto CDs. You cannot transfer it onto an iPod.”

Thousands of iPods were bought in the run-up to Christmas by people hoping to download music onto them from their CD collection or internet sites. But Irma’s Doyle said that anyone doing so would be breaking the law.

“People think that if there is no commercial gain that they can do it,” he said. “They can’t.”

While the article unhelpfully mixes up a number of related issues (illegal downloading, ripping from your own CDs, burning legally downloaded music to CD), it does appear that IRMA are keen to remind people just how few rights they enjoy in relation to sound recordings. It’s not clear whether they are planning to come after you for ripping your CD collection onto your iPod, but they do want you to know that Irish copyright law offers no exemption for this activity. Having read Chapter 6 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000, it appears they are technically correct. The only exemption I can find which might apply is that of “Fair dealing: research or private study“.

Is this a timely reminder that the law needs to be amended to take account of the entirely reasonable activity of transferring your own CD collection onto your own digital music player?

Slashdot carried a story a few days ago about car sharing services (car clubs) in the US. It qualifies as “news for nerds” because of the technology used to manage bookings and control access to the cars.

I’ve always thought that car clubs should be tried in Dublin, as they address both the traffic and parking problems. I managed to get an objective to support car sharing schemes included in an early draft of the new Dublin City Development Plan; it will be interesting to see if this survives into the final version, which is due in February.

For more on car clubs, check out this article from the Guardian.

One of the main projects I’ve been working on for the past few months has finally come to fruition: an upgrade of the email service at dublin.ie. In early December we upgraded 11,000 users from a system based on @Mail 3.6 to one based on @Mail 4, running on new hardware with about 10 times the storage.

The upgrade has finally allowed us to start dealing with the spam issue effectively, as @Mail 4 has built-in support for SpamAssassin and users can make use of Bayesian filtering to train the spam filter. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, on a typical day we block more than 50% of all messages received as spam. Today’s stats are 12,254 messages received, 14,453 blocked by the spam filter.

As part of the upgrade, we also created an email service for another public service agency, which will be run on a pilot basis. In 2005, dublin.ie will be introducing a premium version of the email service for a small annual fee, but the intention is to always provide a free version.